The monthly Magnificat magazine (subscribe here) includes a reflection from a French Carthusian monk who died in 1945, Dom Augustin Guillerand. If you’re back into old habits and want to start again before January’s end, with prayer, it might help get us back on track: Life has an inner source, namely God. And God cannot [Read More...]

From Vatican Radio, a description of Pope Francis’s time with Manila “street children” today: Father Lombardi chooses to describe the deep emotion arising from Pope Francis’s unscheduled meeting with street children which he explains, took place in a home for street children run by the ANAK-Tnk charitable foundation. The home, he says, normally hosts some [Read More...]

1. Bishop James Conley of Lincoln writes: Brittany Maynard was deceived about what dignity really means. Dignity is not the same as painlessness, or the ability to function, or the freedom from becoming a “burden.” A dignified death is not one that is free from suffering, or one that absolves family members from compassion in [Read More...]

1. St. Athanasius today in the Liturgy of the Hours: The almighty and most holy Word of the Father pervades the whole of reality, everywhere unfolding his power and shining on all things visible and invisible. He sustains it all and binds it together in himself. He leaves nothing devoid of his power but gives [Read More...]

1. Proclaim Christ with joy. 2. Get the day’s Mass readings in your inbox, every day, via the U.S. bishops’ conference. 3. Fr. Robert Barron on the decline of philosophy. 4. Emily Stimpson has a new blog. Michael Novak has one too. 5. Last night I was in Philadelphia with Catholic Voices USA, doing some [Read More...]

1. On the “heroic moment” of getting out of bed. 2. A tweet in continuity against evil: JP2 called it The Culture of Death. BXVI called it The Dictatorship of Relativism. Francis calls it Throwaway Culture. They're all correct. — Matt Swaim (@mattswaim) January 12, 2015 3. Pope Francis was greeted by 40 elephants in [Read More...]

1. From Arkansas: When he was around 12 years old, Luis Miguel Pacheco, a frustrated, suffering kid in Mexico, told God he hated him. Just 16 years later, God changed his heart and is working through him to serve the Church. 2.From St. Clement I, from today’s Liturgy of the Hours: Give us grace, Lord, [Read More...]